Valve Deadlock

8/21/24 @ 12:30am

Still working on the mini-Truman Show essay, but my friend just invited me to the playtesting for Valve's new project "Deadlock". I had heard a little bit about it before, mainly that people thought it was going to be an Overwatch/Valorant clone or a general lazy cash grab type of game. After playing it for about 8 hours today, I think I disagree with that even though I went in very skeptical. First off, even though it sounds like a lazy mish-mash of every competitive game valve has made, the combination of stuff is surprisingly effective imo. It's like a MOBA for people who don't like MOBAs and an FPS for people who don't like FPS. There's enough complexity that people that are into Dota 2's complexity won't be necessarily disappointed, but also it's got enough room for beginners that it's not too insane to start out on. Plus even though the gameplay feels mostly MOBA-y, the FPS aspect is done really well. It doesn't feel exactly like you're playing a hero shooter, or like you're just in first person on League or Dota, it almost kind of plays like an arena shooter like quake or something (which I love).

The other think I liked about it is that it's got the "valve game vibe", if that makes any sense. It's the kind of quirky, silly, and slightly dark energy that their main games like half life, portal, and team fortress have. I always felt that Dota 2 was kind of missing that, since it originally started as a mod of Blizzard's Warcraft III and didn't really have the same opportunity for Valve to insert its creative worldbuilding. Deadlock is set in a supernatural steampunk city which might be New York based on some of the dialogue. Aesthetically it's kind of like if Soul Eater/Blue exorcist, Dishonored, and Team Fortress got mashed together. I'm really hoping they go hard on the worldbuilding and external media, bc honestly that's 90% of what makes competitive games appealing to me. Like as an occasional MOBA player, I can't really tell that much of a difference between Dota and League, but I'm way more attached to the characters in League thanks to how well Arcane turned out. I think they will though, there's a lot of random lore references in game that would be really bizarre if they didn't flesh it out in some way. I hope they at least do something similar to the "Meet the" series from TF2, but really I think they should do something a little bit more involved than that.

I've always kind of been a Valve/Source Engine person, so I'm probably a bit biased since one of my first games was Half Life 2 and I basically spent my entire high school time playing Garry's Mod. I've got high hopes for the game though, and since they're doing the closed player-testing NDA thing, hopefully they won't rush making it or over/under hype it. I heard rumors that they might be gearing up to announce it at one of the game conventions this month, so maybe even in a few days there will be more concrete information about it.

I have "The Truman Show" takes. D-Beat riffs, guns, and CBD

8/19/24 @ 7:45am

Took a little mini break from updating the site this week so I could do some reorganization and cleaning in my apartment. I tried CBD flower for the first time this week, I was feeling a little anxious so my GF and I went on a little field trip around our city and ended up getting a little CBD hemp/lavender pre-roll. It was fun! The CBD pre-roll was pretty nice, I honestly wasn't expecting anything at all because I've had CBD gummies before and they didn't seem to do anything. I definitely felt it though surprisingly, it had a really nice calm effect. Plus since it was actual hemp and I'm *extremely* sensitive to any THC compounds I got a little buzz i guess? It was several steps down from being anywhere near legitimately high, but it was just enough I could tell I was feeling the 1%-ish THCa, which was a nice unexpected bonus. I have some minor psychotic symptoms so I usually don't smoke actual weed unless I know it not a strain that's too strong for me. [cue that meme of AI Joe Biden saying that Americans want to smoke dirt weed] It was nice though, next time I can I'm probably gonna go get a couple grams of flower for bedtime and anxiety.

We also went and thrifted a new coffee table since our old one was disintegrating (literally) and then looked around a gun shop since she's super into guns. They had a lot of interesting stuff, they had a weird single shot pistol thing that looked extremely goofy, a very pretty carbine type rifle (I think it was an M1 since that's one of her favorites and she was very excited), and a Springfield M1A .308 tanker rifle which looked like it would absolutely shatter my weak baby shoulder if I shot it lmao. I don't know much about guns but hopefully sometime relatively soon we're gonna go take some shooting classes together so I can learn the basic safety stuff and she can brush up on it.

Besides that I've just been practicing guitar mainly. I've been trying to learn some D-Beat riffs lately because I realized a lot of them are surprisingly easy but also give me a chance to play fast and intense which I love doing. Right now I'm playing Conquest by Disclose and Protest and Survive by Discharge. I can play pretty fast without straining now since I spent my first month drilling a riff that was probably way too fast to start out with, but I think I need to work on my pick technique a little bit because I am absolutely shredding through picks at a rate that does not seem correct. I'm assuming that's probably not helping my string crossings either lol. I've also been doing a little bit of doodling and practicing graffiti handstyles, the graffiti is a little frustrating because I move a lot slower progressing with that than some of my other hobbies, but I think with some more time it will start to look better. I just finished up the 88x31 button for this site right before writing this! I tried writing the text out in a Nausea type font on paper and then copied it over to my computer and cranked the contrast all the way up in gimp. I really like the effect it gives stuff, it reminds me of a lot of crustpunk band art for album covers and stencils and stuff that has a sort of scribbly photocopied look.

Also! I finally watched The Truman Show. It's one of those movies that I feel like everyone constantly references but that I have never actually seen. For some reason I thought it was a lot older than it was, but I realized its like a 90s Jim Carrey movie. He's so funny I love him, and I think the fact that he's a silly goofy guy made the darker aspects of the movie hit a lot better. I ended up really liking the movie, it's probably in my top 3 now. I even kind of got stuck thinking about it and ended up doing some extra reading, so I'm gonna eventually put a slightly rambly mini essay at the bottom of this post so I can get it out of my system, even if its not necessarily great quality analysis or writing. (WIP)

Beach Episode, Deep South Food, The Playlist, and Rare Lichens

8/9/24 @ 1am

I just got back from travelling to Florida to meet some of my partner's family. It was a lot of fun and I tried to catalogue as many plants as I could while I was there. We found a lot of Sea Oats, Beach Sunflowers, Beach Morning Glories, and Largeleaf Pennyworts. We have Saw Palmettos where we live in Alabama, but I always love seeing the massive brushes of Saw Palmettos when you get closer to the coasts. I even saw a massive palmetto bug (a giant kind of cockroach that usually feed on their rotting fruit) that was extremely pretty and surprisingly colorful. I really dislike cockroaches indoors, since I know they cause problems and allergies, but outdoors I actually appreciate them a lot. There were plenty of Southern Magnolia and Cabbage Palms, and some Cottony Goldenaster and Sea Lavender. There was also some invasive Sheep Sorrel that I was a little afraid to dig up because of how sensitive beach dune ecosystems are, but I did eat some of the leaves. It was interesting, kind of like sour arugula, but not like a bright sourness, more like the weird dry feeling you get when you eat a warhead candy, but toned down.

The most exciting thing I found, was a couple of lichens hanging out alone next to a very gross looking brackish river, which I'm pretty sure a nearby resort was dumping greywater into or something, because it smelled awful and looked worse. Anyway, just between the ocean-facing dune and this litle river were two small cladonia lichens growing on a piece of sandstone. At first I didn't think much of it, because I don't know very much about lichens, but after I looked into it a little bit I realized that one of them was almost certainly the endangered Florida Perforate Lichen. It is mostly found along the panhandle, including an island that was within biking distance of where I found it. I'm not 100% certain about my ID, but it was in the right place/environment, and had a distinctive thick branched look with some holes in them, almost like the peeled bark of a Crepe Myrtle. Beside it, I found another lichen, which I *think* is a different species, and I **think** could be Cladonia Dimorphoclada, Subtenuis, or Evansii? If anyone can identify it, please let me know.

My partner's parents took us to a deep south buffet in Grady, Alabama called 'Red's Little Schoolhouse' on the way. It's a super tiny town, but the food was really good and I ended up getting multiple plates and sharing some coconut/chocolate cream pie with my girlfriend. I think people immediately think of fried chicken or barbeque when they think of the south, but really I think southern food is a lot more about beans than people think. There were at least three different bean dishes there, which is great for me because I love beans.

I'm back home again now, it's been a very busy summer apparently lmao. I finally finished digitizing the playlist, which is very nice since I can finally scrobble what I'm listening to to my last.fm without having to use spotify, and I'm not reliant on internet connection to keep my page open either. It's not as long as it felt like it was, but it is still definitely 20 hours of music, not including the fact that most of the tracks I downloaded the full album to if I could. My AC has not yet been fixed and it is so, so, so fucking hot here. Beside all of that, I've accidentally gotten into a homestuck themed baking contest with one of my GF's new friends, so today I baked a lime-flavored green slime pie.

DeBian goof

8/2/24 @ 3:30pm

So for the past couple of weeks since I switched back to using firefox regularly, I've noticed that SCMplayer doesn't work about 90% of the time. Usually it would pop up with youtube error 150 and just immediately stop. I assumed that it was just SCMplayer not working on less minimalistic browsers, since when I was using Qutebrowser it was totally fine.

I just realized that this is literally just because I installed firefox from the Debian repository, so its the weird super out of date extended release version, and that the latest firefox actually works perfectly fine with it (though apparently marquees don't work correctly which I will need to do some testing on). So anyway, I desperately need to stop using Debian lmao. This is like the 9th time I've had some annoying problem and realized it's just because Debian software is always super out of date. When I'm feeling less lazy I'll switch my computer over to Arch or Manjaro.

Police Murder Of Sonya Massey and Her Family's GoFundMe

7/31/24 @ 6:25am

Earlier this month, an unarmed Black schizophrenic woman named Sonya Massey was shot and killed by Sean Grayson of the Sangamon County sheriff's office. After dealing with a brief outbreak of fake fundraisers, her family has set up an official fundraiser. Please donate and/or spread it around wherever you can.

You can find it here.

The cops cannot keep getting away with this, please keep your eyes on the Sangamon County Police Department and the trial of Sean Grayson. Attend any protests that you can! Say her name!!!

Fanshen, Practicing My HoBBies, and Digitizing My Playlist

7/27/24 @ 8pm

I'm absolutely slogging through digitizing this website's playlist. I realized a while ago when I switched back to firefox as my main browser that SCMPlayer just straight up doesn't work on most songs for some reason. I'd fallen into the habit of just opening my website when I wanted to listen to music, which isn't great because that just means I'm functionally using youtube to listen to stuff, so I decided I'd commit and take the time to just digitize the whole playlist. Maybe down the line I can host the music somewhere and have it manually play on the site so I don't have to keep SCMPlayer up, but it is so much music. Currently the amount I have digitized is 21 hours, and that's only a little over half of it. Anyway so I've been enjoying hopping between bandcamp, archive.org, anarcho-punk.org, and random spanish extreme music blogs for the downloads I need. As a result I've learned a new word in spanish:

(Download)

Unending love for the extreme music blogspot community, I would have never been able to find half of this playlist without the downloads they've been hosting. Anyway it's nice having direct access to my music again. I play it through VLC media player so it's able to show up on my last.fm.

Besides that I've been playing guitar and doing more desk drawings. I got surprisingly into the latter, I think it's just been a while since I've drawn random stuff without worrying about it and also I like having a little personalized space with my desk a lot. I'm planning on doing a larger drawing on the empty side today, I'll probably tack it onto this post if it ends up looking okay/I don't get doodle-shy. I've been really interested in Christian imagery despite not being Christian, it's pretty often both intense and macabre in a way that I don't think most Christians actually realize. Guitar has been going well, my callouses are in now and I've started doing some scales. I can play the fast part of "Bleed Me An Ocean" mostly fine if I warm up enough and have a metronome, but it's still inconsistent enough that I can't play through the whole song without mistakes. Slowly getting there though.

Transfemmified Martyrdom of Polycarp

My girlfriend and I have started reading Fanshen aloud to each other. It's a historical account of land reform during the Chinese revolution in a small village called 张庄村 Zhangzhuangcun from the POV of an American maoist working for the UN as an English teacher. We've both been wanting to read it for a while, but it's just slightly not relavent enough for her studies for her to force herself to read it, and I'm bad at reading book length works without getting distracted. Normally this would mean that we just listen to it as an audiobook, but since there isn't one, the next best thing was us reading it out loud. It's very interesting, the village of Zhangzhuangcun (which he calls Long Bow Village) is an extremely poor and rural settlement in the rainy Shanxi province. The author was there teaching at one of the guerilla-run learning institutions after the communist revolutionaries opened a new offensive against the US-backed Guomintang. When he arrives with the volunteer workers to start dismantling the landlord system, the village is in a pretty awful condition. The region was ravaged during the brutal Japanese colonial conquest and just a short while before the entire yellow river was released from its system of levies by the Guomintang, which caused mass flooding. Landlords and petty nobles left over from the feudal system stole massive amounts of the farmer's crops and even apparently their literal shit for fertilizing their personal fields. It's extremely interesting to read about just how bad things were, and how much people were positively affected by the initial land reforms. It reminds me a lot of how my dad described Korea, having to slingshot pidgeons from powerlines for dinner and walking miles to a school with no power or plumbing.

Desk Doodles and 回路 Kairo (2001)

7/24/24 @ 8:30pm

Last night I had a random burst of energy and ended up fixing an old desk we found in a dumpster a month or so ago. It's been a very long time since I've physically repaired something so I got some butch boi ego points after figuring out how to reassemble the cabinet mechanism. After that, I spent like probably four or five hourse total just doodling and writing all over it with some sharpies. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out its like a little graffiti collage. It's got some band logos, lyrics, some stickers, and random little doodles. I freehanded the Acid Bath "When The Kite String Pops" album cover on one side, and I made a little G.I.S.M. "Military Affairs Neurotic" inspired spot on the front.

Warning Possible Kairo (2001) Spoilers

Today I've been thinking about the Japanese horror movie Kairo for some reason. It's probably my favorite non-slasher, non-silly, non-jumpscare horror movie. It's about ghosts getting trapped in the internet and haunting its users with depression and emotional isolation until they kill themselves. It's such a terrifying movie because all of the scary scenes make you look head on at the ghosts without any jumpscares or reprieve. There's a scene in it that is pretty famous because it is so scary and well choreographed (click here). If I remember correctly, they hired a professional ballerina or a dancer or something to come up with a choreography of the most uncanny and unnatural movements possible for her scene as a ghost.

The main reason I love the movie though, is because the whole thing is a critique of the social conditions of modernity. Its main premise is that as humanity becomes more and more connected, somehow it also becomes crushingly isolated. Despite having instantaneous connection to almost anywhere in the world, people in the movie withdraw into themselves, lose their friendships, and wither away alone. The movie seems to ask whether humanity is just so incompetent that giving it access to advanced tools causes its collapse, or if there are other factors at play in the development of modern isolation. Is it just the nature of death that ghosts become bitter and lonely, or did disatisfaction during their lives cause them to try to destroy all remaining life? I think that both of these things point to the movie being about the factors that cause the inability to connect in modern life. Capitalism reduces us to spending our lives worrying about producing for the owning classes, while we spend what's left fetishizing the products. Under this regime, a social tool such as the internet is devalued; ripped at by corporations for profit or used as a mere means of escape when genuine social interaction becomes a second (or even third) job after a day full of extraction. The internet has its many moments of authenticity (I'd argue neocities is one of them), but the majority of it is flooded with commercials, distractions, and the neurotic content of cults and conspiracy theorists, all on account of our collective loss of the freedom to live with each other. Kairo is one of my favorite horror movies because it uses its ghosts to reflect this loss. They don't just look like dead people, somehow even their movements are incorrect for a human; they exist in the points of the room that are dark and blurry, leaving only a black stain on the wall when the lights come on. Was there really something there? Or was it just an overactive imagination played against a weird splotch in the dark? The ghosts of isolation and discontent do not look anything like us because we do not even look anything like us. The movie offers us a prompt: "change this set of conditions, or learn to exist in spite of the isolation". "Imagine Sisyphus happy, or dare to imagine something else entirely."

(NSFW) Dumpster Anomalies (NSFW)

7/21/24 @ 2:30am

Today has been... very odd. Our roommate went dumpster diving in our apartment's parking lot today, and returned with a massive binder full of porn dvds. At least 150+ hours of stuff from the early 2000s and late '90s. A lot of it is like manually burned and recorded from VHS tapes as well, with some of the discs being multiple hour blurays. Apparently, someone got rid of it next to the dumpster and people from our apartment have just been slowly picking at it by taking whatever porn they wanted until our roommate got his hands on it. It's completely bizarre. So, yeah we spent our morning going through someone's hilariously weird porn collection. My favorite is "TSA: Your Ass Is In Our Hands", which is airport security themed. The early to mid 2000s were a wild time. Also, we got their office chair lmao. It's been thoroughly disinfected and scrubbed down because I can only assume that was the former porn connoisseur's gooner throne...

As if that weren't an odd enough start, when we all went out there together to see if there was any other stuff, my girlfriend found a fucking shotgun. The dumpster smelled like someone dumped an eighth or so of weed in there too. She very carefully took it up to our apartment to get a better look at it (with gloves on because none of us wanted our prints on the dumpster gun). Wildy, it came with shells!!! It was a very pretty vintage double barrel 20 bore, but not worth a massive amount of money or anything. She thought about keeping it since guns are kind of her hyperfixation, but eventually turned it in in case it turned out to be something crazy (also because the entire apartment swimming pool watched her pull it out of the bag in the parking lot, so if the cops came there wouldn't be much question where it went lmaoo). Btw, I find it very funny that just a few weeks ago, the cops were harassing her and our roommate for dumpster diving, but when they get a free gun for their evidence auction suddenly its "oh yeah we should go dumpster diving". Wish we didn't have to give it to them, but at risk of sounding paranoid, none of us really want them showing up at our apartment in a week looking for a murder weapon or something. I tend to have bad luck with cops.

I wasn't feeling too great today for some reason, I had some crazy nightmares that were ironically about police, but I made a lot of progress with my guitar practice. I'm mostly working on my picking right now until my callouses come in all the way. It makes me very nostalgic for being in middle school getting my first cello callouses. I finally got the part of "Bleed Me An Ocean" that I'm working on up from 170bpm to a messy 240bpm, and I'm not exclusively reliant on downstrokes anymore. My fretting wrist is still getting sore after playing, but I think when I get my callouses and my muscles adjust to holding strings down again I'll have an opportunity to fix my posture. I've been doing metronome picking exercises as I said, but I think tomorrow I'm going to add scales and try to learn as many as possible. I really want to have a better foundation with guitar, so I'm trying to un-repress my college music theory memories right now.

Last night I made some yellow split pea curry with some vegetables I got on a walk past our Asian market down the street and leftover oat milk. Whenever I make curry I usually make a kind of fried cornmeal flatbread. It's not really traditional to anywhere, but I love eating with flatbreads and I'm not skilled or patient enough to actually make dosas or parathas. I'd say what I make is somewhere between a dosa and Native American Frybread. While we were all eating, we ended up watching Batman Forever. It's sooooo good. Jim Carrey is such a creature of a man, they couldn't have cast a better riddler if they tried. Paul dano is my favorite serious tone riddler, and I love that he referenced Jim Carrey's Edward Nygma's glasses. I don't usually like super hero stuff, but somehow batman always wins me over. Not even batman himself, I'm always rooting for the villains. Batman's villains are the best, and I really like that they can basically be as silly or as serious as you want. Maybe I'll make a batman villains shrine page soon. Realistically it'd be a riddler shrine probably.

Also, here's one last picture from the research trip. Big fan of the anarchist stencil font style.

Home Again and Trying Oat Milk

7/18/24 @ 11pm

I'm home again! I'm so tired, but I had a lot of fun. We got to stop one more time for documents on the way down and briefly pass through St. Louis where I used live to see the arch. I spent most of today practicing guitar and running errands. I've been trying to figure out the basics of guitar since the last time I actually played any kind of guitar was almost four years ago, and that was a bass guitar. Picking was really hard at first because I'm used to either using my fingers or a bow, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. At this point, with a warm up, picking isn't that bad. My much bigger issue is that my fretting hand gets very sore very quickly. My guess as to what is happening is that since I am used to the cello and violin/viola, I'm arching my wrist onto the fretboard, but for guitar it seems like this is not very useful because my wrist is constantly in a stressed angle. I think what I need to be doing is straightening my wrist so my fingers are hitting the strings at an angle and not messing up my upper arm. I thought my stringed instrument experience would come in handy, but it's actually being incredibly counterproductive at the moment lmao. I've mainly just been doing scales and rhythm exercises to get a feel for the instrument, but I've set my first little project to be learning 'Bleed Me An Ocean' by Acid Bath. It's pretty much all the same chord shape and only has one part that speeds up a lot, so It's surprisingly not super out of reach for me as a beginner. I think it's probably gonna take me a while to get it solidly playable though, but that's okay because I'd like to learn how to do vocals while I'm playing.

Besides that I mainly just ran errands today. We went to the grocery store and restocked after being out of everything for a long time. I got a carton of oat milk that was only like a few cents more expensive the generic brand normal milk. I rate it......

5/5 oat Quakers. It's really good lol. It definitely does not taste like milk, in fact it actually kind of tastes like unsweetened sugar cookie dough or something? It's surprisingly creamy, way more than almond or soy milk, almost even veering towards coconut cream territory. When you put it in cereal or anything where you aren't just drinking it straight, it's basically indistinguishable from milk. The best part though: I'm not fucking allergic to it!!! I've got a birch pollen allergy, so almond milk makes my throat itchy, and soy milk would probably make me completely throw up if I drank it. Oat milk doesn't seem to have that issue, so big points for oat milk. I made some vodka sauce pasta using leftover Everclear and some of the oat milk and it turned out pretty good. Also, I just found out that Corey Taylor from Slipknot was in the Nostalgia Critic's weird shitty Pink Floyd's Wall spoof. I'm deeply confused as to why he was involved, it's just such a random cameo.

Chill Wisconsin LiBrary Coding

7/16/24 @ 2pm

Welp, we're finally about to start heading back. Just one more stop in Southern Illinois and we're home in Alabama. I spent the morning hanging out in the University of Wisconsin Madison's beautiful library coding the javascript cookie system for the easter egg hunt stuff on this website, so it's been a fairly chill day. I forgot how much I enjoy actually coding, I seem to always end up wanting to do more even though it frustrates me when things don't work. I suspect by a few months time there are going to be a lot of random easter eggs and widgets to play with on here. I'm trying to get it to a point where the site feels filled out and interactive.

The storms have been wild! We left Chicago literally right after the storm hit I think, like we were even at O'Hare before we left. Crazy. For some reason its weird to think about a tornado hitting a big city like Chicago, but I guess it actually makes a lot of sense. The storms followed us to Madison a bit though, the past two nights it was just absolutely crazy lightning and a lot of rain, which I actually really like while I'm driving.

Field Museum and Madison, Wisconsin

7/15/24 @ 12am

Had my last day in Chicago today! We went to the Field Museum downtown before we had to go. I wasn't familiar with it so I didn't really know what to expect initially. It is absolutely massive and has some cool stuff, especially the evolutionary history and mineral/meteorite exhibits. However... It also has massive colonial plunder energy. There are a ridiculous number of artifacts that are either clearly stolen, questionably sourced, or or not explained in origin. For example, there is a big Oceania cultural exhibit that is absolutely filled with plundered objects. They had a full case of ancestral icons (I think from New Guinea) that are incredibly sacred to my knowledge, especially considering they probably were not more than 150 years old. Maori ceremonial weapons, native Columbian gold jewelery, and Chinese religious statues all add up to an astounding perpetuation of colonialism. I did not see this while we were there, but my girlfriend mentioned that they had a sign up in the Oceania exhibit implying they were in possession of the skulls of indigenous people stolen from ancestral shrines. They also have two massive engraved Haida house posts, which I'm pretty sure were obtained during the violent destruction of traditional Haida housing (which by the way are incredibly beautiful and you should go look them up). Even if you were to ignore the artifacts, on the second floor there is a bizarre sculpture exhibit that, if I understood the sign correctly, was an early addition to the museum meant to represent the different "racial types" of humans according to the race science of 1933. The sign literally goes (paraphrasing) "yeah this is racist, but also it's still good art so we left it out". So yeah, the dinosaurs were cool, but genuinely fuck the field museum, I hope their stuff gets robbed and returned to their rightful lands.

After that, we walked around downtown Chicago for a bit. I've been taking in all the graffiti because I love reading people's tags and seeing big ones on overpasses and trains. I got a few pictures on the way back to our car. We went and got some kimbap and seasoned baby crabs from H-mart and then headed out for our last stop northward in Madison, Wisconsin. Also, we got to drive through the town I lived in when I was little which was cool! We're in Madison now, we've got one day here and then one last stop in Illinois on the way back down to get some documents that my girlfriend was waiting on. We might stop in Memphis to see the National Civil Rights Museum, but other than that, we're almost done.

Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago History Museum, and Tourist Food

7/14/24 @ 12:30am

Today was pretty packed. We went to the Chicago history museum and saw a protest art exhibit which was really cool. They had an old L-train car with stained glass skylights and wicker seats. My favorite part was the sensory room, which I'm pretty sure was being mostly used by kids, but I sat my autistic ass down and played with the plastic hotdog toppings anyway.

We also went to the Lincoln Park Zoo and it was awesome. They actually had a lot of the native plants I was looking for yesterday in the garden portions of their park, which was really nice to see. The place itself was so sick, partially because it was free, but mostly because it had some of my favorite animals. They had some howler monkeys, white-faced sakis, titis, and lots of beautiful birds. They even had my girlfriend's favorite animal, the African painted dog, though they weren't visible in their habitat. I bought her a cute painted dog plushie and she got a painted dog t-shirt. About half-way through the day we got some Chicago style hotdogs downtown, I got the vegan version which was really good. It's very convenient going to big cities sometimes, because it's way easier to find vegan/vegetarian options at random restaurants. Anyway, after we got done with everything we went to a Lou Malnati's to get some deep dish veggie pizza, which was super good as always. Lou Malnati's is my mom's favorite pizza place, so I always try to get it when I'm in Chicago. Today pretty much hit all of the "typical tourist" foods.

This has definitely been one of the most memorable trips I've ever taken. On a state territory basis, by tomorrow we will have connected from the gulf coast to Canada. I'm looking forward to doing some more stuff tomorrow and then exploring Madison, Wisconsin the next day, but I'm also very excited to get home and start practicing guitar.

Midewin Prairie Reserve, H-Mart, and Chicago

7/13/24 @ 12:45pm

We finally made it to Chicago! We're gonna spend the weekend here hanging out before we have to head to our last new stop in Madison. It was such a long day, but it was very cool as well. After like five hours of driving, my partner and I stopped at an Hmart to get some food. We've been dying to go to an Hmart, because our area is theoretically supposed to get one but it keeps getting delayed, and honestly there is not much in the way of Korean groceries around where we live. My dad used to take me to Hmart from time to time when I lived in Chicago as a kid, and my last memory of it was getting some Ojingeo Bokkeum squid stirfry from one of the foodcourt restaurants. Anyway, seeing it again was sick; so much fucking stuff!!! I can barely get gochujang and kimchi where I live, but they had literally dozens of types and brands of each. We got some jokbal (pig feet) with mustard sauce, some stirfried dried filefish, and some stirfried dried baby anchovies (this is my girlfriend's favorite Korean food) from the refrigerated takeaway section. I hadn't eaten all day so I absolutely inhaled it and it was so good. I hadn't actually had stirfried filefish jerky before but I think it might be my favorite of the stirfried dried fish genre of Korean sides. After we ate, we got lost in O'Hare international airport looking for a friend and finally checked into our hotel.

While we were making the long drive to Chicago, we stopped at the Midewin Prairie Reserve. It is genuinely one of the coolest nature parks I've ever been to. They have some fields where they are trying to replenish a bison population, an eagles nest, a massive native plant regeneration program, and a weird abandoned bunker thing. We got some stuff from the gift shop, but the coolest things we got there were the free manuals of native and invasive plants, spiders, fish, and birds that they were giving out. They also were giving out free posters and stickers, which I will probably post here when we get home. I went full autism mode when we got out into the native prairie trail and started trying to find all of the plants on the list. I found about 28% of the natives which I'll list here:
Wild Bergamot, Pale Purple Coneflower, Prairie Blazing Star, Purple Prairie Clover, Prairie Milkweed, Prairie Dock, Compass Plant, Yellow Coneflower, Black Eyed Susan, Prairie Sunflower, Sullivant's Coneflower*, Wild Quinine, Culver's root, Rattlesnake-Master, Big Bluestem, Indian Grass, and Prairie Dropseed.

I have a pretty hard time distinquishing Yellow Coneflower and Sullivant's Coneflower, but I'm pretty sure I saw both. I got to see Purple Prairie Clover, which I've been hyperfixating on for a while, but unfortunately it seems like Red Clover has taken up a lot of the space that could be occupied by native clovers. Also, the place was absolutely teeming with bunnies that don't seem to mind people that much (not sure if that's great for them but it was cute), there were small herds of them crossing the trails at certain points. We didn't see any bison which was a little disappointing, but I was extremely hyped to find Prairie Blazing Star, which is very pretty in person and I only found one example of on the whole trail. I realized while I was there that I've never actually seen a bison which is extremely sad given that they where once common across North America, even in the south! White settlers hunted and destroyed bison populations for profit and to intentionally starve out the native peoples of the plains. Apparently only a little more than 300 remained before repopulation efforts began. I really hope that the Prairie Reserve expands its awesome work, but I also really hope that it moves in a direction of collaboration with and return of land stewardship to the indigenous people who managed that land before it was almost destroyed by American imperialism.

"If We Ain't Got News, We'll Make It"

7/11/24 @ 12am

"We no longer can sit at home hoping that the armed pig won't bust down our door without reason and not be just a half mad trigger happy lunatic. We are being subjected to repressive acts which could cost us our lives. This is why we must now see clearly the need for knowledge of self-defence on all levels for all possible situations. Remember, bullets don't grow flowers and flowers don't stop bullets. Arm yourself today!" - Excerpt from a Big Muddy Gazette Article about self defence

The search for documents continues! My partner went through some special collections today and I got the task of checking through a local radical newspaper from the 60s-70s for anything she might need. The paper is called the 'Big Muddy Gazette' and every issue is absolutely packed with beautiful art and writings from across the leftist and Black power movements of Carbondale, IL and the entire nation. The paper reads uncannily relatably to the current decade. The tactics it describes for silencing Vietnam war protesters sound exactly like the things universities have tried doing barely a few months ago to pro-Palestine encampments. The main difference that stands out thematically is that the moment in the 60s-70s the BMG captures was rife with violent defensive action against the state. Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, pipe bombs taking out cops; tensions during this period were boiling over in a way that the state could no longer just stamp out with propaganda and brute force. Reading it made me both hopeful and concerned at what other parallels our time might also come to mirror. The Big Muddy was incredibly of its time, with 70s fonts, rock and roll, and even yogurt recipes. I've posted some of the pictures I took, and I'll put a cannabis recipe I found in it on the recipes tab.

In other news, I did a little exploring of a wildlife refuge and drank a forty of Mickey's and ate some microwave Jamaican patties in our hotel room. I spent a little bit of the day hyperfixating on insulation types. Vacuum insulation panels are pretty interesting, but seem extremely fragile. Tomorrow we're gonna go see a prairie reserve and head up to Chicago!

Cyprus Creek Refuge

7/10/24 @ 10pm

It's our last day in southern Illinois before we move on to the next town. My partner collected some documents and went around to some of the city municipal buildings. She had to get some information from the cops, and found out that the town couldn't even afford a $27 can of spray paint without the maintenance worker card declining, but could somehow afford to pay $40 an hour to way too many cops for a town that only recently got a small grocery store (not that any number of cops is acceptable). Apparently, they were even hiring a new person on top of all of them. Actually baffling how much local governments dickride for the police when they can barely get anything else done.

In better news, we got some barbeque and then went to explore a local cyprus wildlife refuge. It was super cool, we found some buttonbush, wild grape, sawtooth blackberry, some sumac, and a gigantic patch of full size triloba pawpaw trees. Not even smallflower pawpaws like we've been finding in Alabama! One of them even had a big fruit on it, it was really cool. Apparently their stem tips are a lot less orange than smallflower pawpaw, but the leaf shape, arrangement, and scent when crushed was the same. We also saw a doe that got really close to us, a lot of frogs (mostly southern leopards), and even a water snake that might have been a cottonmouth.

Birthday, research trip, and guitars

7/9/24 @ 5pm

It was just my birthday a few days ago! I ate a bunch of wings and bought an electric guitar from my brother, so it was pretty epic. When I get back home I can start practicing. I used to be the assistant principal cellist at my university before I left so it's felt really unsettling not having an instrument of some sort with me over the past few years. I'm super hyped to finally have something to play again, I want to learn how to do vocals as well but I'll probably need to find a place I can park my car to practice bc we have thin walls lol. I used to do throat singing too, so I'm hoping some of the residual knowledge of that might help me figure out scream techniques eventually.

Also, we finally left for my partner's big research gathering trip. We're in Southern Illinois right now so she can try to get any archival documents that she can about the civil rights movement that took place here. Coincidentally a tropical storm just passed through, and the town we are in is extremely flood-prone, so the roads have been very rough. We've got two more days in Southern Illinois and then we can head up to Chicago and Madison to hang out a bit and get some other documents.

SCMplayer and Some Tattoo RamBling

7/6/24 @ 2am

Working on the website a lot right now, and I am really developing a love hate relationship with SCM player. On one hand, its super sick to have music playing on the website, and is probably 90% of what I like about my site. On the other hand, because of how it works, it breaks like half of the things I want to do. Maybe one day when I have more commitment I'll look into attempting to modify it. Don't know if that's within the scope of my ability tho lol.

I really want to try making some tattoo stencil designs of native Alabama flowers and plants. It would be cool if I could give myself a botanical leg sleeve of lots of different small plant tattoos. I think maybe some trilliums would look really good as a tattoo. Definitely coneflowers and some native clovers. Cahaba lily would be great for a tattoo as well.

Pokemon Gaia

7/4/24 @ 9:45pm

I've been playing A LOT of a gameboy advance ROMhack called 'Pokemon Gaia'. It's sooo good, it plays like an upgraded version of the original GBA pokemon games. You can get almost all of the pokemon up to gen 6, mega evolutions, and a lot more. This is kind of perfect for me because my favorite generations are 1 and 5, so I can pretty much have all my favorite pokemon in one place without any extra hassle. Apparently the final version, which includes a lot of fixes and the post game, *might* be coming sometime soon, but the game is still more or less complete as is. Right now I've got a crustle, lampent, kirlia, golem, and a torterra, but I'm trying to get an onix as well because I really love steelix.

Other than that, I've just been hanging out. We've been cutting it a little close financially saving up for my girlfriend's research trip, but it should be fine + we might get approved for EBT soon anyway. When things go back to normal, I think we might try to go semi-vegan. I don't actually have any problem with eating meat or animal products, but I think that industrial animal farming is not an acceptable way of obtaining them for a lot of reasons. I've also been reading a little bit about earthships so I've been putting some ideas together for a similar ecoarchitecture concept for a tropical/humid subtropical region where a traditional earthship might not be effective.

Hardtack, Trash, And An Upcoming Roadtrip

6/27/24 @ 12am

Spent today making hardtack and watching lucky star on a whim. The hardtack is honestly surprisingly fine soaked in tea for when I'm a little overstimulated and just want flavorless stuff to fill me up. I made it with half bread flour and half masa, mainly bc we had a bunch of masa we aren't using but also because I thought it would be neat to emulate a historical parched corn type of biscuit ration. I'm considering making some more in bulk and canning it for emergency food and snacks.

I did some litter cleanup the other day at the park where we found the pawpaws. It's so badly polluted, i got three bags of trash before i had to go and there was still a bunch left. On top of that my city is just casually letting the sewer system dump almost 70,000 gallons of raw sewage into the same ecosystem monthly because they want to spend more on useless cops than basic infrastructure. Thankfully they're getting sued for that right now so hopefully that goes somewhere.

I'm also super excited because I've got a big roadtrip coming up! My girlfriend needs to go to Illinois to gather some resources on civil rights history for her graduate thesis, so we get to basically drive across the country from southern AL, to Madison WI. Hopefully we're gonna meet up with a friend in Chicago too, so that will be sick.

Random Stuff I've Been Interested in Lately

6/18/24 @ 8am

I've been fixating on lots of random stuff lately. Firstly, living with Debian linux as my daily driver for the past year has slowly built up a lot of annoyances with programs not having the latest features I want, and some just not even being available in the repositories at all. A lot of the programs I use on a regular basis have to be individually manually updated because I couldn't just download them from the repositories due to this fact. The tradeoff has been that my system has literally never had any sort of instability or breakage. Anyway, it made me start thinking about trying Arch again, and maybe moving on to wayland/hyprland for my window manager and display system, so I've been screwing around with those in virtual machines off and on. I had a bad experience with Manjaro in high school (not exactly the same thing but still), but I'm 90% sure it was literally just because I didn't know what I was doing and downloaded a bunch of random stuff from the AUR.

Secondly, I've been thinking about houseplants. I really want to get some native houseplants, or really any houseplants. My apartment is made of concrete blocks so it can get a little depressing looking and stuffy lmao. These aren't native, but maybe some Monstera Adansonii would be cool, they have crazy looking leaves and I've read that big tropical leafed plants can have a minor air quality effect. What I would fucking lose my shit for would be a potted bigleaf magnolia. They're so pretty, I found some the other week and they look very interesting. When they're young they literally almost look like banana trees, it's so odd. I don't know how well a bigleaf magnolia would tolerate being inside, but my guess is they'd probably be fine with it? They're understory trees and they don't like wind or competition, so as long as I had it next to the brightest window and maintained its roots, maybe it would work? Some others I've thought about are smallflower pawpaw (of course), Adam's needle, and native prairie clovers (for outside). I don't really have experience with houseplants so I'm just kind of throwing stuff at the wall right now until I actually try it.

Besides that I've been hyperfixating on hydroponics systems and grey water reclamation. I really want to try some small scale experiments with sand filters and lucky bamboo/duckweed beds for recycling water from washing hands, showering, and washing clothes. I've got a sort of lofty goal of reducing my water usage by over ninety percent, while still expanding projects that require water like houseplants and maybe even a small hydroponic system. I've been binging a lot of solarpunk socialist content lately (specifically andrewism on youtube, go check him out!) and my area's going through an insane heatwave that literally broke our AC, so building some personal resiliency to the current and coming climate crises has been on my mind. I just think it would be neat to start acclimating to a degrowth lifestyle now so its not as much of a problem later. Being able to passively purify some of my own grey water and supplement groceries with a small hydroponics system would be super sick next time an insane heatwave or drought comes. I really want to work with my hands on some physical projects, even if I don't commit to the hydroponics I might try to rent a plot in our city's community garden.

Fruit Fly Suprises

6/7/24 @ 2pm

My partners and I recently went to a local riverside park that has a pretty extensive nature trail. It's a really cool place because it has a beautiful riffle where you can go swimming and its also a common hangout for graffiti taggers who paint on the many large rock formations. Anyway, I was walking alone through the woods collecting sticks for a project while they were swimming and I came across something super suprising. One of my partners and I have been looking for wild pawpaw trees for literally years at this point. Any park or reserve we go to, we usually make an effort to look out for their big green fruit or their long ovular leaves. We usually end up disappointed, and it happens so often that we have an inside joke about hating pignut hickory trees because of how often we think they're pawpaws from a distance. At first what I thought I had seen in the park was like a green walnut that had fallen out of a tree or something, but I quickly realized that it was a very weird looking pawpaw on a low-lying tree. They have a distinctive kidney shape, long oval leaves with drip tips, and earthy orange skin at the tips of their branches. This one, though, was like not even a quarter of the size of a normal pawpaw tree, it was probably smaller than most garden plants. I thought that maybe I had misidentified it, but as I found other patches of them I also heard lots of fruit flies buzzing around. Pawpaws are predominantly pollinated by small beetles and flies due to their dark colored flowers and vaguely musty smell, so at this point there wasn't much I could be mistaking it for besides a pawpaw. Apparently, the specific species we found was not a common pawpaw, which is part of why I was so confused because pawpaw are not very common in the lower half of my state where I currently live. Instead, it turned out to be a smallflower pawpaw, which is basically just a mini pawpaw that can survive in far southern climates all the way down to parts of Florida. We were ridiculously excited to have even found this, because we have not had luck finding anything in the past. In a few weeks we plan to go back and see if we can get one of the fruit after its grown a little bit, so maybe we can each try like a teaspoon of pawpaw since they are very small. I'm tempted to try and germinate some of the seeds, but I'll definitely be spreading at least some of them.

Covid, Free t-shirts, and Updates

5/24/24 @ the witching hour

Well, I'm stuck inside with covid right now, but luckily it's given me a burst of energy to do some housekeeping on this site. I've been updating the playlist pretty steadily, but its definitely time to finish cleaning up the site itself. BTW something I just learned the hard way, Pfizer gouged the price of paxlovid, a med which costs them $13.38 to produce to $1500 dollars without insurance, so fuck Pfizer. Anyway, I've just been hanging out and watching a lot of 80s horror movies with my partners. Hobgoblins, Return of the Living Dead, and C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. are all really good (or really bad depending on your POV). Besides that, I ordered a t-shirt from one of my favorite local bands B.O.R.N. recently and they put a bunch of free ones in with it, which was super sweet. ;w;